Business managers use metrics to manage aspects of their businesses. For example, a business might be managed to achieve quarterly earnings per share. Or, a business might be managed with an emphasis on attracting new customers in a given time period. In most cases, businesses compete with other businesses in the same domain, and often businesses compete with other businesses for the same types of customers.
While such businesses might be able to measure and compare quarter-on-quarter earnings per share or quarter-on-quarter changes in customer acquisition, and while such business might be able to rank business performance relative to peers (e.g., competing companies in the same industry or same size, or courting the same customer base, etc.), by the time the metrics are published (e.g., peers have published their respective performance metrics) and compared to obtain a ranking, it is usually quite late to take corrective action.
A better approach is to have a much faster way to obtain peer rankings, perhaps on a daily basis rather than a quarterly basis. Unfortunately most businesses do not collect and/or calculate and/or publish their results as frequently as day-by-day.
In the age of the Internet, and especially regarding businesses that use applications (e.g., web applications) to interact with players in their ecosystem (e.g., customers and suppliers), such businesses often use a cloud service to host their applications. This puts the cloud service vendor in a unique position to collect business metrics across multiple businesses (e.g., the multiple businesses being tenants of the cloud service vendor). Even more, the cloud service vendor is in a position to collect a vast amount of data pertaining to a wide range of aspects of the hosted applications. For example, a cloud service vendor can take granular measurements such as the number of sessions open at a given moment, or the rate at which a session is closed before a purchase is made, or the length of time spent in a session before a purchase is made, etc.
What is needed is a way to rapidly and continuously collect business metrics and to report normalized extramural business rankings. Legacy approaches fail to achieve the capabilities of the herein-disclosed techniques for transforming cloud service measurements into anonymized extramural business rankings. Therefore, there is a need for improvements.